It's a tech incubator with a twist: Blockspaces' blockchain incubator is less about the technology and more about the idea behind it.
"I've been running meetups for over a year now, talking about how are some of the big companies are adopting blockchain," Chris Williams, Blockspaces CTO said. "...I noticed the people who showed up would work in blockchain alone, in isolation. I thought if there are this many people toiling away and not getting connected to the larger community, it would be that much harder to launch something meaningful. It was putting my finger in the wind and seeing where the momentum was headed."
Blockspaces is an accelerator and incubator with focuses on education and development services in the blockchain industry. Its incubator portion opened in January, hosting eight entities with ideas in various stages. Three of those ideas will be presented to the public on Thursday, March 28 and Williams said while the goal of the three companies is different, there is one common denominator.
"I'm feeling like everybody has their own intentions, but we all have one thing in common: headline value," he said. "We want Tampa Bay to know we’re serious about building blockchain startups here. "
The three companies are:
- EZ-lawyer: looking for investors, uses a cloud platform for businesses and lawyers to create blockchain-secured, self-managing legal contact and find collaborative consensus faster
- Coin Catcher: William's company, an app that creates a loyalty program game for businesses which will be doing an alpha launch
- Project Marlin: a solution for home loans and mortgage insurance that is less consumer-focused and more for large finance companies
Applications for the next round of incubation are open, with a late April deadline. Anyone who's a member of Blockspaces, which costs $99/month, can be part of the incubator.
And for those feeling overwhelmed at the thought of using blockchain, or unsure if their pitch would even use blockchain, Williams has some words of reassurance.
"I encourage everyone that comes in to describe their problem and never mention blockchain once," he said. "If it still holds up, you know you're focused on the value of the idea versus the technology."
